Over a quarter of the U.S. population thinks we are being visited by aliens from outer space. According to surveys, it’s a belief that has persisted for decades. While the scientific community dismisses such ideas contemptuously (among many reasons cited: Astronomers never seem to see UFOs), invasion by extraterrestrials remains a topic of immense popular interest, especially in places like my hometown of Woodstock, New York.
That’s only to be expected, given the unending stream of E.T.-like movies, pseudo-documentaries, supermarket-tabloid headlines, and abduction literature. Counterbalancing all of this? Nothing whatsoever. Reasoned discussions delving into the pros and cons of possible alien visitations are simply not part of most school curricula. Nor do the media find it profitable to present professorial scientists patiently explaining why they see the whole thing as misidentification, fiction, or the activities of publicity seekers and the mentally unbalanced. For most, scientific discussion and step-by-step reasoning is boring. Abduction tales are titillating. There’s no contest.
Still, a future visit by extraterrestrials is not altogether impossible. While interstellar distances are daunting, a surfeit of intelligent life probably abides within our own galaxy. What might really happen in such an encounter?
Our collective expectations have been so thoroughly shaped by the surprisingly consistent fictional versions that such novels and movies furnish an almost mandatory starting point. The place to begin is the obligatory scene where the military commander explains why the aliens from space must be kept top secret: “So people won’t panic.” As the plot unfolds, however, everyone does learn about the invasion, and they duly bear out the general’s prescience by running through the streets.
Let’s construct a more credible scenario. First, the New York Times headline: EVIDENCE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPACECRAFT CITED. But then does our sedentary population immediately stampede through the streets? Crowds of screaming people dashing helter-skelter, trampling others underfoot? Not only does this reaction seem uncharacteristically energetic for a seriously over-weight citizenry, but we’d wonder where all these people are headed. To escape alien invaders, no earthly destination would seem any better than any other. Why budge?
In reality, our reactions to an alien visit would be shaped by our perception of their motives. Why have they come? Making war against us would seem unlikely, unless our own aggressive inclinations are the behavioral paradigm for the entire universe—a notion as frightening as the aliens themselves.
Arriving in search of food is just as ludicrous. The more dissimilar the life-forms, the less likely they are to find agreement as to what constitutes tasty cuisine. On a more optimistic note, they might be altruistic and have come to instruct us. But an invasion by didactic pedants might be just as intolerable as an onslaught of creatures looking for a midnight snack.
Perhaps they’d come as salespersons, to sell us things. Since so many of our own initiatives are commercially motivated, maybe other life-forms operate the same way. We’re a planet with an un-usual amount of lead and uranium. We could trade some of it for new, entertaining gadgets; we’d be the Indians that sold Manhattan island.
But let’s back up a bit to see why this alien business is so appealing. Is it the human love of mystery and the unknown? Or do the tabloids and TV merely reflect a fascination that derives from the scientific community itself?
Scientists routinely announce lofty, abstract, long-term goals to justify their areas of research. Astronomers at NASA cannot seem to bring themselves to admit that we have sent a machine to orbit Jupiter because it is an amazing place to explore, period. They always add something like, “This will teach us about Earth.”
The public is apparently not to be let in on the fact that astronomy is a useless science. There is nothing practical to be gained by learning that Andromeda is really 2.2 million light-years away and not 750,000, a correction gained from the Palomar telescope. The revision, so important and dramatic to astronomers, will not affect even one of the 6 billion people who have the potential to learn that fact, and it won’t improve their quality of life in the slightest. That we are taxed so researchers can glean information like this is wonderfully pointless.
Faced with the choice between abstract knowledge and cold cash, relatively few taxpayers would agree to fork over ten bucks apiece to send a spacecraft to the giant outer planets. So we don’t ask them. NASA’s policy: Don’t ask, don’t tell. When we talk about space missions, we say it’s so we can learn about Earth: Discovering more about our planet puts a good face on the investment.
But the ultimate “amazing discovery” toward which everything else is supposedly vaguely directed, the finding we are told will Change Everything, would be to find that We Are Not Alone. Un-covering extraterrestrial life, it’s repeated as gospel, would be the Greatest Thing Ever.
Why? And who says?
When it was discovered earlier this century that some life coexisting with us on Earth may be just as smart as we (for example, dolphins), did that Change Everything? Hardly. We have not even catalogued most species of terrestrial life. We don’t know what they do or really understand their role in the world’s ecosystem. Why should life beyond our atmosphere be such a quantum leap, more important than life-forms we either take for granted or routinely bring to extinction in the name of cattle-raising and ham-burger production?
So, let’s say the aliens come. First off, we’ll want to know: What do they want and what’s in it for us?
We’ll assume that they’re smart, so right off the bat we’ll attempt to exploit their knowledge, and we may well be unsuccessful. We’ve always been bothered when anyone has inside information about which we’re left out in the cold, so uncommunicative aliens with patently superior knowledge or abilities will simply bug the hell out of us. Annoying might ultimately be the most accurate description of an invasion by benign but taciturn aliens.
If they’re passive and prove as tasty as lobster, then another outcome follows: We’ll eventually eat them.
If they’re vastly superior militarily, we’ll be forced to accede to their whims. Or they could simply keep us in the dark about their motives, their reasons for remaining in our lives as unfathomable as that of macaroni salad.
If they’re innocent and naive, well, heaven help them. They’re out-of-towners stepping off the bus at Times Square. After we do the old three-card monte, they’ll be lucky to go home with the ship on which they came.
But run through the streets? No, that’s not our thing unless we’re looting and burning. And we don’t do that in novel, puzzling situations. When something truly new occurs, our most likely reaction is to reach for the phone to be the first to tell our friends.
The fun part, of course, would be if we could communicate with them using anything resembling language. Many of us have fairly close relationships with favorite mammals such as dogs, cats, or even horses. But no verbal communication. We don’t want our animal friends to speak, even if they could manage it. Who would want Spot to say, “Hey, Jim, c’mon now. It’s six A.M. and I wanna go out and pee on your car’s front wheel”? Or a cat to sniff the new food and say, “This stuff sucks, Joanie”? We seem to enjoy the dog’s obsequious whines and definitely get a somatic buzz from the cat’s purr. In short, we’re very happy to enjoy their own vocalizations.
Not so with aliens. In no popular film are we shown taking the time (and it might be centuries) to “feel them out” and determine their likes and dislikes, to merge with their “vibes.” Most of us would have little patience or inclination to learn to love alien sounds and habits. Instead, we expect aliens to communicate with us in human terms, even if the first efforts involve strange noises and unsuccessful translation attempts. However it’s managed, what we really are seeking is not meeting yet another life-form—for we have a surfeit right here that we will ignore right until the last individuals are extinct—but verbal companionship. This is some-thing humans have never had with another species. It is this lonely hearts club quality of earthly life—the need to know we are not galactic orphans—that tacitly drives the space budget, the unacknowledged bottom line in extraterrestrial exploration.
Alas, here too we have not thought the matter through. Just as the new car soon loses its charm and novelty, the new conversations will be valuable only so long as they produce useful information. Can they give us cures to diseases? Faster rockets? More powerful weapons? What’s in it for us? Once that issue has been milked, we don’t want to sit around chatting about the weather on the planet Vandor. Scientifically oriented types, or those who love exploring the endless vagaries of our own natural world, might want to gather around the campfire to discover their “tales from the beyond.” But most people would probably prefer sticking with neighborhood gossip. If we do not presently enjoy hearing about everyday life in Tibet, or learning a little geology or meteorology just for the sheer joy of it, then what, really, will the aliens have to tell us? Can they instill joie de vivre in the chronically bored?
(Ah, but if they could, wouldn’t that be the greatest gift they could possibly bring?)
The metaphysically minded would want to hear the spiritual views of the extraterrestrials. Do they believe in God? Do they subscribe to reincarnation? Do their views match those of mystics through the ages who claimed that truth is universal if ineffable?
But here again we can smell trouble. Rabid members of organized religions together with the church hierarchy would feel threatened by the far-out competition. How likely would it be that our three-eyed visitor from Nereid would be a Presbyterian? No, these are heathens whose views must be rejected. It’s hard to see how their philosophical counsel would be welcomed.
Extra trouble: What if they offered more than mere counsel? What if they actively came to proselytize? Celestial Jehovah’s Witnesses who had not only found a new neighborhood, but the ultimate in a captive audience—6 billion humans held in place by an unyielding gravitational field.
Many would follow them if they played their presumed ace of advanced science. Technology just modestly beyond ours would seem indistinguishable from magic. If they could levitate or walk through walls, many of us would sit at their feet as if they were Hindu swamis. Just as the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ruled the masses with a few wizardlike items such as matches, aliens could wow our socks off with the same kind of gadgetry we ourselves might possess a half-century hence.
Or perhaps their interest would involve real estate. In a universe where most surfaces are either gaseous or too tiny to hold on to an atmosphere, we live on a rare and therefore valuable property. Moreover, Earth is the only known planet with liquid water. Aquatically oriented aliens might find our terrain as irresistible as a water-slide theme park.
Location is everything, and we occupy this solar system’s prime lot. Any alien interest could drive up property values. Or, conversely, the global insecurity created by alien attention could cause landowners to sell off and invest in whatever suddenly gained value because the aliens had no interest in taking it.
Of all the possibilities, most sci-fi movies seem focused on scenarios dealing solely with war and hostility. And it is the general paranoia that such fiction has collectively instilled that may flavor our response if the event ever does unfold. Aliens may be anything; their motives may be anything. But we will surely stay in character and greet them with the suspicion accorded strangers nosing around the Ozarks.
It is possible that visiting aliens would be tiny, perhaps even microscopic. It is even possible that we have already been “invaded,” aeons ago, and that these aliens are now incorporated into our lives.
Or even our bodies. Our very existence is possible only because energy-producing life-forms called mitochondria live within each of our cells. Mitochondria are so different from nearly all other kinds of earthly life that they are alien in almost every sense. Could they have landed here after hitching rides aboard comets or meteoroids and eventually found their niche not only on our planet but within the same brains that contemplate the strange affair? Such symbiotic relationships may be the ultimate result of meetings between life-forms of different worlds—but only if they are both carbon-based and structured around amino acids.
It is also possible that aliens could be altogether invisible to us. Since 90 percent of the universe is made of unknown material, aliens composed of such substances would have properties of which we could not even dream. But even if they were built of baryonic matter—atoms just like ours—they might experience time in a radically different way. Just as we cannot see a hummingbird’s wings, a creature that moved through time at, say, a billion times our own rate, would be extremely difficult to detect.
Suppose aliens might have found a way to blend in with any background at all: extraterrestrial chameleons. Then, too, our eyes are sensitive to just a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Creatures who could somehow radiate solely in the infrared or microwave range would not be seen.
If amino acids do form the basis for life in other places, then our detection of them in meteors and, more recently, in amino acid precursors in distant nebulae augurs well for some kind of universal biological commonality. On the other hand, the differing atmospheres, gravitational fields, compositions, temperatures, biological defense needs, and degrees of competition with their own native biota would surely dictate form and function resembling nothing of earthly life at all.
The bottom line is this: There is no way, extrapolating intelligently from our terrestrial situation, to gain the slightest idea of what alien life would be like. Having been wrong repeatedly about much simpler things (such as how the far side of the moon would look), we can only plumb our own tendencies to see how we our-selves would react to the visit. And perhaps live more in the present moment by honestly acknowledging that finding other life is not the ultimate goal of space science.
The real goal is exploring for its own sake, for the sheer joy of it, and letting new findings take us where they may. This is a nonstructured, open-ended procedure that seems capable of stirring our minds and spirits indefinitely, a process that works simply because it has its own life. Discovery’s winds carry us in its maniacal eddies, propelling us along very different paths than we’d be following were we pursuing any static, charted purpose—including the Finding That Will Change Everything.
Meanwhile, my idea is to set up an interplanetary buoy, like a barking watchdog: CAUTION—QUIRKY, DANGEROUS ORGANISMS ON SOL THREE. Then our consciences would be clear. If aliens come anyway, and don’t have the good luck to land in a UFO-receptive place such as my beloved Woodstock, well, they can’t say they weren’t warned.